One Hard Truth Every True Leader Must Discover

Exceptional leaders at some point all learn that there will always be people who are smarter than you, bigger and stronger than you and even more experienced than you are. In fact great leaders find that the only way to be successful is to enlist people with the needed strengths you don't have, or those who can be developed to have those strengths, to build your team accordingly.

The one thing you cannot do is seek people who are better prepared than you. To be effective as a leader you must be the most prepared of all.

Truly exceptional leaders learn that you cannot get other people to go anywhere you are not prepared to go yourself.

Being prepared is what enables you to identify both the strengths and weaknesses of yourself and of your organization in order to seize the opportunities that emerge into view.

The single greatest strength available to any leader is human potential. How you identify and develop the potential in others will determine the limitations of your leadership.

Your job is to identify what is possible and then inspire people to make that necessary. Without preparation we cannot effectively develop other people to their necessary and fullest potential. Where leadership competency comes into play is that you must fully prepared yourself prepare others.

Preparation is the part of learning that focuses on knowing what you need to know— so you can accomplish what you need to do.

Above all else, this requires being curious and operating in the learning-mode.

Finally, the degree of curiosity needed to prepare yourself to be a competent leader requires courage. The courage to question what you know, what you don't know (and need to), and, as Mark Twain famously quipped, what you thought you knew that might turn out not be true.

The hard truth about leadership is that you must prepare yourself to at all times be the most competent person in the room. This simply means being fully-competent in your role as a leader. You need to understand that it is your role to make everyone that surrounds you as competent as they can possibly be - and only when we accomplish this are we ourselves truly competent. Our competence is a matter of what others accomplish.

This is why leadership is a journey of constant discovery with no final destination. The moment we lose sight of our purpose, allow our curiosity to be extinguished, believe we have learned what we need to know - or have arrived where we need to be - you discover that you might be irrelevant. And isn't being relevant essential to what leadership is all about?

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Phil Liebman is the Founder and CEO at ALPS Leadership - Where we help people fully competent, truly exceptional leaders.

www.ALPSLeadership.com

Phil is also been a Group Chairman with Vistage Worldwide since 2005 - where he helps leaders realize their potential by learning with and from other leaders. He is the author of the soon-to-be published book, "Cultivating MoJo: How competent leaders inspire exceptional performance."